What is the Difference Between Organic and Paid Marketing?

Grabbing the attention of people and turning them into customers is far from an easy task in today’s highly competitive markets. To get into their minds, businesses need precisely formulated and strategically designed marketing campaigns.

There are many different ways of planning these campaigns, but in terms of overall tactics, two methods emerge – organic and paid marketing. Some marketers swear by the first while others do so for the latter, but the only way to make an effective decision and reach your marketing goals is to understand them both.

And that is precisely the purpose of this post.

Information & Sales Pitches

In these two terms lies the core difference between organic and paid marketing. Organic marketing is more of a natural occurrence as you’re building your brand. It is basically word of mouth that spreads across social media platforms and similar networks. At the core of it is the information about relevant questions in the industry that will help potential customers solve their problems. Of course, information about your products or services is a part of the solution to those problems. Although it can contain sales pitches, the relevance of the information is what positions you higher in organic search results.

On the other hand, paid advertising is all about well-crafted sales pitches. It is usually very easy to recognize, no matter if it comes in the form of search results, social media posts, or billboards. It is immediately visible and that’s the part of why we pay for it. Of course, the differences go beyond that, so it’s time to dive deeper.

Impact

Paid marketing gives you more control over the information that gets out and the scale of its reach. That information is specifically tailored for a target audience, which means you’re also in control of your brand image from the start. This approach also saves a lot of time since it will effectively kickstart a business, increasing traffic during those initial stages. Right after you create a paid ad it will appear at the top of search results.

But the fact that paid ads are easily recognizable sales pitches shakes up the consumers’ trust and many tend to avoid them. People tend to make more purchases based on personal recommendations and organic marketing is much closer to that. Of course, there are examples when the line is blurred between the two. Google Ads is an obvious one that comes to mind, as it was recently observed in a poll, many users couldn’t tell the difference between the organic and non-organic variety.

Investment

The assumption that paid marketing is expensive while organic comes for free is entirely wrong. They both require certain investments.

The cost of paid marketing depends on how competitive the keywords you use are. Greater competition means a higher bidding price – that’s simply how PPC works. But the biggest cost incurred in paid marketing is that of a failed campaign – if you manage it wrong you’ll end up with unqualified leads and throwing money out the window. So the investment also comes in the form of time dedicated to tracking results and optimizing your campaigns.

Organic marketing is mostly about that time commitment, which means that the results will take time. Additionally, developing a strong presence doesn’t require only time – higher ratings also demand resources. These include either external contractors or internal employees that will create quality content with SEO in mind. Conversely, this can also mean that sometimes, paid marketing might prove cheaper, in the short run.

In the Long Run

With paid marketing, you’ll get immediate results but they’ll also be momentary. Your ads will disappear the moment you stop paying for them. On the other hand, the traffic you’ll get from organic marketing will be permanent. After you’ve spent some time building your content library, you’ll reach that position where the visitors will be coming back to your website, and your brand will remain fresh in their minds. If you have relevant and high-quality content, a lasting and strong customer relationship is guaranteed.

A Powerful Combo

As you can see, both organic and paid marketing have their benefits as well as their downsides. Ultimately, you’ll achieve the best results by combining the two, creating some new marketing potential precisely from these differences.

These two approaches can work to support the other. You can start with paid marketing to achieve those immediate results while slowly building your organic campaign to additionally boost your online presence. At one point, your organic traffic will be significant enough to replace the paid kind, or at the very least, reduce the overall costs involved, going forward.